Snapshots: Faculty Research and Creative Work

Combatting Obesity

Amy Bidwell (left) and Elizabeth Keida of the health promotion and wellness faculty meet in Mary Walker Health Center to talk about a program to help obese children in Oswego County and in northeast Brazil learn about nutrition, exercise and behavioral triggers for unhealthy eating. Thanks to earning a highly competitive grant from 100,000 Strong in the Americas, Oswego and SUNY Ulster, along with a Brazilian university, will recruit college students to help implement the 16-week program in both nations.

Preserving an Indigenous Language in Paraguay

Tracy Lewis.SUNY Oswego.05/13/2014

Tracy K. Lewis, distinguished teaching professor in the modern languages and literatures department, has been named a member and honorary professor in the Ateneo de Lengua y Cultura Guarani in Paraguay, in recog­nition of his career-long dedication to Guarani, the South American nation’s co-official language, with Spanish. Throughout his career, Lewis has per­petuated Guarani—the only indigenous language of the Americas whose speakers include a large proportion of non-indigenous people—through his poetry, many literary translations, conference appearances, advocacy for the language and other scholarship.

Using Games to Inform Scholarship

Christopher Harris, computer science faculty.SUNY Oswego02/27/2015

Computer science faculty member Christopher Harris earned a Fulbright Scholar award to spend 10 months in Finland teaching courses in human-computer interaction and working with video-game developers and business people. He hopes to learn from Scandinavia’s successful gaming industry—birthplace of such games as “Angry Birds,” “Clash of Clans” and “Minecraft”— to improve student engagement in learning, users’ experiences in other realms and online business, among other areas.

Tracing Science Advances to Ancient Asian Culture

Alok Kumar, physics department faculty.SUNY Oswego.07/03/2014

Alok Kumar, a professor of physics, wrote two books that focus on the multicultural nature of science and the role of ancient civilizations on the modern world. Sciences of the Ancient Hindus, published in 2014 by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, describes many discoveries and advances of the ancient inhabitants of the country now known as India. His next book, written with Scott L. Montgomery of the University of Washington, is A History of Science in World Cultures: Voices of Knowledge, to be published in 2015 by Routledge.

Recognizing a Young Faculty Researcher, Teacher

Christopher Chandler of the biological sciences department recently earned a highly competitive National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development grant. The award, the most prestigious the foundation gives to junior faculty, will provide more than $640,000 over the course of five years to fund advanced genomic research for Chandler and his students. The grant will allow Chandler and his students to expand
their research and collect more data on isopods, commonly known as pillbugs or potato bugs.

“They are a special species that has bacteria that live in them that can cause them to change from male to female to ensure the survival of the species,” he said. “Understanding the sex chromosomes in the genes is very important. From an evolutionary standpoint, we think this is key to understanding how one species may divide into two species.” The grant will provide more hands-on research for students.

Chandler currently makes genomic research available in a small Biology 492 capstone class, but this grant can allow
this work to become more cutting-edge, replicable and widely disseminated.

Chandler joined Oswego’s faculty in 2012 after earning a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology from Iowa State University, followed by postdoctoral research at Michigan State University.

Creating an Interdisciplinary Multimedia Magazine

Graphic design majors Julio Valenzuela ’15 (left) and Guilherme Assis ’15 display a part of the work that has gone into the Exist magazine app, a collaborative project of student artists, writers, illustrators, filmmakers, musicians, editors, design­ers and others based on the Graphic Flash fiction-and-artwork exhibitions of recent semesters. With the assistance of nearly $10,000 from a SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grant, classes in graphic design, creative writing, cinema and screen studies, music, journalism and others published Volume 1, Issue 1 of Exist, available for free on Appster for iPad.

Showcasing Student Scholarship

Quest, the annual day-long symposium, dedicated to sharing the scholarly and creative pursuits of students, faculty and staff at SUNY Oswego, celebrated 35 years in April.

Throughout the day, presentations spanning multiple curricula were held in the Marano Campus Center and the Shineman Center for Science, Engineering and Innovation. No regular classes were held so students and faculty could attend lectures and presentations of interest, experience research from their peers and support their friends and classmates.

During the poster presentation session in the Marano Campus Center, Roodline Cineus ’15, a biology major, presented her research, “The Abundance and Characteristics of Aquatic Tree Hole Communities in Three German Forests.”

“I like Quest a lot because not only do I get to teach others about my findings, but I also have the chance to learn about other projects,” Cineus said. “It’s a day that the professors become the students.”

The daylong event is coordinated by the Scholarly and Creative Activities Committee and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. Find out more and see the full list of presentations at oswego.edu/quest.